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A show presenting the best new scholarship in political and social philosophy, featuring lively conversations with leading thinkers. Join hosts Jeffrey Howard and Emily McTernan as they explore some of the thorniest ethical questions of our time.
Episode 2
DON’T ASK THAT with Samantha Berstler
Welcome to Philosophically Speaking, I'm Jeff Howard.
And I'm Emily McTernan.
And this is our new podcast, where we'll interview leading philosophers on their recent work. Our chats are going to help you catch up on cutting edge scholarship and think through some of the trickiest ethical and political challenges of our time.
This week, we're talking about whether you can wrong someone just by asking them a question.
Bad Question is the title of a paper by Professor Sam Berstler of MIT, who's here with us to explain what exactly a bad question is and why it matters.
Should we go get him?
Let's do it.
So, welcome to the podcast, Sam.
Yeah, I'm really, really excited to be here to talk to you guys.
So, let's start with the question. What is a bad question?
A bad question would be, what color is your underwear? Do you have cancer? In some countries, such as the United States, what is your salary and are you happy with it?
So, let's try and pin down a bit these features of bad questions. So, I guess for the audience listening, they're going to be thinking, well, it's kind of a bit prying or intrusive or inappropriate. What is it about them that's starting to trouble you?
I first got into this project because I wanted to understand the sense in which certain questions, just by asking them, could grab information from the other person. Just by asking a question, I could pull it out from you. And this would just felt very intuitive. Like we describe a question like, do you have cancer or are you happy with the amount of sex you're having every month? We intuitively describe these as probing or prying. And this felt really intuitive to me. It never struck me as mysterious until I was teaching a grad seminar. And I asked my students, what does make these prying or probing? And in the discussion, I realized I had no idea and they had no idea. What's really puzzling about these questions is from a theoretical standpoint, it seems like the question, what color is your underwear, is equivalent to the question, are you willing to waive your privacy rights with respect to the question, what color is your underwear? And it might be ridiculous to ask somebody that, in the same way it might be really ridiculous for me to say, are you willing to waive your property rights with respect to your house? And just give it to me. That can be a completely silly, stupid, offensive, entitled thing to ask somebody. But the question itself is not rights violating. At least it's not violating your right to your house. I don't thereby take your house from you when I ask you, are you willing to waive your property rights with respect to your house? But that doesn't seem to be the case with questions. When I say, how much do you weigh? How much money do you make? What color is your underwear? That itself seems to constitute a privacy right violation. And so I thought, look, I don't think our practice is wrong. I don't think we're wrong when we describe these as probing. I think something is wrong with the theory or something is wrong with the way we're conceptualizing of information transfer and conversations.
And it's because of that, I take it, in the paper, you've got this fascinating work on, it's the situation it puts the person who receives the question in. So I think at one point you described it as like, there's no good option.
Yes.
So I guess, why is there no good option? So you ask me, how much do you weigh? What can I do? And why am I so stuck?
Okay, so you have basically, it seems like three options, just intuitively. You can tell me how much you weigh. You can lie to me about how much you weigh. So you can possibly give me a more flattering answer if you're uncomfortable with telling me the true amount that you weigh. That would be like the position I'm in. Or you can say, I'm so sorry, I don't want to answer that. That's private information. The problem is, if you say the third thing, then in context, you're still revealing something about yourself. It all depends on exactly how you say it and exactly what the cultural context is that you're in and what you know about each other. But you're revealing that you're unhappy with your weight or that you weigh more than you want to. Or potentially that the actual number on the scale might be higher than what it looks like when you're wearing clothing. And all those things might be pieces of information you don't want to give to the other person.
Great. So we have the sense that a question is bad because it leaves the person to whom it's asked with only bad options. But you take this further and you say that these questions are bad in a further sense, namely that they're morally objectionable. They wrong their addressees. Indeed, do you think they potentially sometimes violate their privacy rights? I think a case might help us here. And the case you return to again and again in the paper is this case of Jacqueline and Camilla, the co-workers. Can you tell us about that case and then we'll talk a bit about why you think there's a privacy issue in how it unfolds?
Yeah, great. So Jacqueline and Camilla are two co-workers. They're not very close friends, but they're familiar with each other. They don't have any kind of long-standing enmity. Jacqueline is very nosy, but she's also a very perceptive person. And she notices that Camilla has been looking sicker and sicker. She's missing days from work. She's crying in the bathroom. Maybe there's a distinctive chemical smell on her. I think sometimes you can, this is a telltale sign that someone is in chemotherapy. And Jacqueline, she has a sixth sense for these things. So she suspects, I know what's going on with Camilla. I think she has cancer. So she just kind of corners Camilla one day and says, Camilla, do you have cancer? Now again, we can go through Camilla's options here. The problem is if she says, I don't want to talk to you about that, that is it's self informative. But also there's other things that could happen if you're someone who's going through cancer and doesn't want to talk about it, and then someone makes it super salient. I mean, you could burst out into tears. You could start getting really anxious, like your blood pressure could spike up and that gives off physiological signs. You could just like look deeply distressed. And all of that is going to, in this context, probably confirm for Jacqueline that her suspicion is correct. Okay, so why think that this is a violation of Camilla's right to privacy? So I start with the assumption that Camilla has some kind of morality, as it were, gives Camilla certain protections via some of her information about herself. And why is that? Well, I don't quite say in this paper, but I just take it for granted that I stand in a special relationship to certain facts about myself. Facts about my health, facts about my romantic life. Maybe if I have something very distressing in my past, certainly facts about my sexual life. And if it were the case that anyone could permissibly ask us prying questions about those facts, it wouldn't be the case that morality would be safeguarding them. So insofar as we're prepared to say Camilla has some kind of moral safeguard, moral right to choose how, when, and to whom to reveal this information, it must be the case that she has a right against Jacqueline asking this question. Otherwise, Jacqueline, we could essentially go around, and so long as we're sufficiently clever in how we ask prying questions, we could go in and grab any kind of information we wanted. I mean, you could even imagine somebody, right, like Jacqueline just continuing to ask Camilla a succession of questions. Like, do you have cancer? Do you have breast cancer? Do you have pancreatic cancer? Do you think you're going to die soon? How are you feeling about all of this? And as these questions go on, gaining more and more information. And insofar as we have a right to privacy, it just must be the case that privacy prohibits this kind of behaviour.
I can see that remaining silent might leak out all these kinds of information, or confirming it clearly leaks out the information that she has cancer. Why isn't lying a good way to go about it?
Great, so in fact, I consider this in the paper, I say, look, maybe what we should just say about these cases is that Camilla no longer is obligated to tell Jacqueline the truth. So in fact, like Emanuel Cahn gestures towards these kinds of cases and says, look, it must be the case that it's permissible to lie here because otherwise someone could, I think he literally uses the phrase, like, use our silences against us. Someone could be like Jacqueline and just keep asking a successive series of questions. And that might be true. Like, I actually set aside the question of is it permissible for Camilla to lie? The problem is that we can't take our ability to credibly lie for granted, especially about information that's emotionally sensitive or that's just, we just become excited or anxious when talking about. So there are many indicators that we're able to pick up on interpersonally, both consciously and subconsciously, of some kind of either distress or a lack of sincerity. So in the paper, I talk about the one second window. This has been studied robustly in experimental linguistics and experimental pragmatics. So we found that very tiny delays in how soon someone asks a question carry information. And I think it's something like a delay of 600 milliseconds carries the information that the speaker is reluctant for some reason to answer the question. And of course, there could be many reasons for this. But one reason is because the question is distressing, which is possibly evidence that she's lying, or she's in some kind of stress because she is having to tell a lie at all. Right? Telling a lie is just cognitively harder than telling the truth. So even if Camilla were to say, no, I don't have cancer, Jacqueline is going to think to herself, hmm, were there any signs she was lying? And there might be.
And I love this part of the paper, and I recommend it to listeners, partly because you have this wonderful thing where you're saying it gets about face-to-face conversations. We're so vulnerable and we're so porous in these cases. We're giving all sorts of information about ourselves without even meaning to like these pauses. But I did have one hesitation about this. So I think on your picture, it's something like, look, if I pause even for a moment, or I don't quite manage to get the lie out in time, I'm kind of lost. My private information is starting to leak out. And I did wonder if that somewhat downplays the signals that we might be, sorry, the complexity of the signals and the variance of the signals that we might be offering. So I think sometimes we pause because it's just so rude and unfitting for our colleague to ask about our sex life or our cancer diagnoses that we're just kind of appalled or I can't believe you're asking it. And so I wonder if on your picture, we're more unerring readers of each other than I think we are. But I think on your picture, it's very often in these sensitive cases leaking my private information.
No, you're absolutely right that what precisely my reluctance is evidence of is going to be highly context sensitive. And in fact, it's not just going to be sensitive to what else is happening in the context, the precise way in which I pause, everything else happening with my body language. It's also going to be sensitive to the skill of the perceiver. So it's important to the case that Jacqueline has a knack for reading people. But some people are absolutely dreadful at reading people. And so even when we're basically blaring through a megaphone with our body language that they're lying, they just cannot seem to pick up on this, right? So in response, one of the things I really love about this question is that it makes me think about the connections between our politeness practices and our privacy rights. And in particular, the connection between our politeness practices and how much information, the reluctance or the pause or the uncomfortable body language, might actually be giving in context. So if we're in a context in which lots and lots of people just refuse to answer the question, how much do you weigh? Because it's just completely inappropriate, it's disgusting, on principle, I will not answer that question even if I'm happy with my weight, even if I want to show off my beautiful athletic body and I'm very proud of what my body looks like, I might just be absolutely appalled by your question. When I'm in that kind of context, you ask me how much do you weigh and I just look appalled at you, there are at least two hypotheses that remain open. I could be having this reaction because I'm very unhappy with my weight, you've made salient something that's distressing to me, I don't want to give you this information. Or it could just be the case that I'm just absolutely disgusted by your behavior and it's a kind of moral outrage response. And so when you make this observation, you realize, okay, part of the function of the politeness practices is precisely to create that epistemic environment. There's a kind of collective safeguarding that these politeness practices, especially the reaction of outrage and disgust in response to the question, generates for everybody.
This is so interesting and we're absolutely going to return to the question of politeness practices. But before we do, just wanted to invite you to say a bit about poise. This is an absolutely fundamental concept in the paper. And you draw on the work of the mid-sensory sociologist Goffman in spelling it out. So tell us a bit about Goffman's notion of poise and what work it's doing for you in the paper.
Yeah, so Goffman is one of the figures who lights the way for me when I think about social interaction. And what I love about Goffman is the extent to which he grounds his work in empirical ethnographic observation. So unlike philosophers, he really went out into the world and thought about how do we behave and how do we understand social interaction. And in much of his work, he emphasizes the importance of self-control, and in particular self-control as a skill that enables us to control how much information we're giving to other people. So someone with a great deal of self-control, and here he means not just restraining myself from punching you when I got frustrated, but literally knowing how to suppress physiological signs of embarrassment, learning how to suppress physiological signs of anxiety, which sometimes means learning how to suppress the anxiety itself, is a way to control what evidence I'm giving you about my underlying mental state. So someone with a great deal of self-control, in this sense, is going to be a much better liar. But they're also going to be in a much better position to resist bad questions, because they're going to be able to control their reaction to the question much better than someone else might, someone with low poise. So I think poise itself is defined as the capacity to control the information that I'm giving off. And of course, that capacity is sensitive to what's going on in my environment. If I'm very sleep deprived, if I'm very distracted, that capacity is going to be weakened, or as it were, my ability to exercise that capacity will be weakened.
So returning to the ethics now, this picture is intriguing, but it also strikes me as quite demanding in that it requires constant vigilance and exercising judgment. Judgment about how good my own poise is in a given moment, how much I'm exuding. Judgment about the poise of my interlocutor. Judgment about how good of a mind reader I am or they are. And this seems highly variegated so that any pair of individuals will have different levels of poise and mind reading power. And so we need to be constantly calibrating and recalibrating what it is that we owe to one another in a way that gives rise to a worry, I think, that your model suggests morality really is tightly regulating our ordinary interpersonal conversations in a way that some people might experience is quite oppressive. Every time they're going to ask a question, they have to calibrate these questions about mentalism and poise. What do you make of that worry?
This is actually a worry that Goffman himself often received when he was active in scholarship. And Goffman argued that in fact, it's just the case that any interaction is a moral battlefield. There are landmines everywhere, and you could try to set them off to hurt the other person if you're malicious or selfish, or you could try to walk across the field with her and stay safe if you're cooperative. But that either way you go, it's going to be incredibly demanding. And it's going to, in order to do this, you don't merely need to have the right intentions. You don't merely, it's not the case that you can do this merely because you've cultivated having the right kind of goodwill towards other people. You need just like brute technical skill, brute technical skill to understand what the other person's capacities are, what your capacities are. And then Goffman talks about frequently you need a kind of proficiency at understanding the expressive implications of what you do and what she does. So you need to be a kind of good literary critic of interaction, as it were. And he thinks that it's very hard, we're always failing to do this. But this is where social life gains both much of its stress for many of us, but also when it works, some of its magic. It's completely incredible that we ever managed to pull this off. And he thinks, well, that's why when you have a good interaction, it's such a beautiful, special thing.
I mean, you might think part of the worry is allayed by adopting a subjective account whereby it's about what could the speaker reasonably predict to be the poise of their interlocutor rather than an objective account, which is sensitive to just the fact of the matter of someone's poise.
Yeah, I think something like that has to be the case. So morality has to be sensitive to what we can reasonably expect from our interactant. To have morally good interactions, there has to be a proper division of labor. Both sides have to be trying to adjust to the other side. And I think it's also the case that what I owe you is in part sensitive to how much you're satisfying your own obligations. So someone who's really just not trying to do her part to make the interaction come off. Someone who's not helping me understand what her level of skill is and how she experiences the social world and how she's interpreting my actions. She can, I think, maybe end up forfeiting some of her rights. I may owe her less deference in regard to her failure to, not just even exercise her abilities, but to have just failed to cultivate herself into someone who can do this.
So while we're talking about the division of labour, we've gone back to the kind of philosophers of language, two people are interacting and they're in a bubble mode, which I know is one that you reject. So let me bring in the kind of, let's go back to those manner and etiquette guides, some of which you draw on in the paper in this kind of fascinating way. And so you might think actually, like in a really important part of this story and the way to simplify perhaps the normative implications for us, like just how difficult and demanding it's going to be to figure out how good Jeff is at hiding stuff, how good you are, what kinds of questions may or may not cross the line in terms of what's going to expose people, is that we just get back to much, much stronger and clearer social norms about the questions we can ask, when we can ask them, who we can ask them to and when. And so I was thinking of rules that I guess I was taught as a young adult, I suppose. Things like, you know, we don't talk about sex or politics at the dinner table. We don't ask people about personal life. We don't know them very well. Will that do the trick? And then we don't have to make these, we don't make these guesses.
In fact, one of my impetuses for writing this paper was to think about the status of some of these norms. And I think these norms work really, really well as a heuristic. If you don't know the other person well, if you, maybe she's from a region you don't know very much about, just rely on some rules of thumb. And if you're both mutually presupposing that you're going to rely on these rules of thumb, not too much can go wrong. I think the reason I didn't want to say like, look, these social norms are in fact such that you should always conform to them is because we can be in context where we know much more about each other. And we know, for example, that both of us are very open to talking about our religious backgrounds. Or we're very liberated about talking about our religious backgrounds, or also we're very skilled social navigators. And because we both understand we're very socially skilled navigators, and we kind of like the social dance, it's permissible for us to play the game at a higher level. Or it's permissible for us to undertake certain kinds of risks with each other that we otherwise couldn't have had. So just understanding this sort of rarer set of moral values and principles underlying those social norms and justifying those social norms, I think, can help us to see what to do when we're in context where we know each other much better. And we don't have to rely on those rules of them anymore.
You talked a moment ago about the reasons or the duties we might have to cultivate our own poise. I'm wondering if our concern for others' privacy gives us at least moral reason to try to degrade our own capacities for mind reading, for mentalism in order to weaken our own capacity to infer from others. Is that an implication of your view? And if not, why not?
I certainly worry that we're under some kind of moral duty not to become the world's best mentalist. Or if we do become the world's best mentalist, that we have to thereby take extra precautions about what kind of scenarios to place ourselves in. What makes us morally complicated is that we also need to use something like mentalism in order to engage in cooperative forms of interaction. And especially, this didn't make it into this paper, but in other work, I talk about Goffman's conception of social interaction as a kind of show, or theatrical arena, where we're simultaneously putting on the show to each other, and helping each other to put on that show. So we're kind of sending each other cues and stage directions in real time, even as we're trying to sort of put on a show that might be contrary to those signals. So for example, if I'm at your house, and I'm getting really tired, and I really do want to leave, but for whatever reason, I can't come up with a face-saving excuse to leave. I might yawn a little bit in front of you. I might show you that I'm surreptitiously checking my phone. I might just let some of my weariness shine through my face. And what I'm expecting and hoping is that you're going to recognize these hints. Maybe you don't know if I'm intentionally revealing them or not, but that's part of the strategy here is you think I'm trying to suppress my tiredness and failing. And that way you can say, oh, you must, it's getting kind of late. I'm starting to flag, you know, how are you feeling? And then the other person feels that she's in a position to say, oh, yeah, it's getting kind of late. I had a lovely time. So if you suppress your mentalism ability or you fail to cultivate yourself into a mentalist, you're going to miss those kinds of signs. And picking up on those kinds of signs is really critically important. So I don't know what the answer is. I mean, there's the kind of handwavy, well, we have to be Aristotelians about this. There's the golden mean of mentalism that we should have, which is we should have enough to get through the social world. But you don't want to be kind of like, have a kind of Sherlock Holmes x-ray like vision into other people's mental heads because you're just making it impossible for them to control your information. I don't know, maybe that's the right answer.
Don't read too much Gossman. Otherwise, you'll learn too many of these tricks of the trade and it'll be hopeless.
Possibly.
It does strike me that the paradigm form of discourse in this paper is this real world, face to face, synchronous, one to one or one to few interaction. And increasingly, we live in a world where people are communicating online asynchronously. So they put a post out there and they wait to see how others react. Often not one to few, but one to many, depending on how many followers one has. Is this an opportunity to avoid some of the problems that arise from synchronous face to face interaction? Or is it cause actually for concern, given that so many of our instincts and intuitions and virtues about good social life arise from our evolution and our development through having these face to face interactions?
I think it's both. So, when people ask me, what's Goffman's view about social media? Well, there was no social media in his day, but what did Goffman say about talking on the telephone, about TV, about radio? What would he say about Twitter and Instagram? I say, well, one of the primary differences is the kind of information and the amount of information you get about each other, when you're talking on the telephone, when you're texting each other versus when you're talking face to face. Online, long-distance telephone communication letters, these are informationally impoverished forms of communication. You lose body language, you use tone of voice, you lose the significance of delays. You don't need to read Goffman to realize this. Everybody has had this experience where they don't know how to interpret an e-mail because they don't know the tone, what tone of voice she would have used, how she said it, and you're like stressed out because it could be really nice or it could be extremely passive aggressive and you just have absolutely no idea. But also, and here's the point I try to make in this paper, that information dampening effect, the kind of informational impoverishment of those forms of communication can be a good thing because if you ask somebody a question over e-mail, she can take time to figure out how to respond. She could also go to her brain trust and try to like brainstorm, like go to her partner or her close friends and say, how do I reply to this e-mail? And they could kind of help her craft a response that carefully titrates the amount of information that she reveals. And so that was one argument for, there's a kind of folk wisdom that anything sensitive or important should be done face to face. I think that's a little bit too quick. There are some cases in which you want to give the person, maybe you do have to ask them the question for whatever reason, but you want to give her the time and privacy to carefully deliberate about what kind of information she wants to reveal, which is just not possible to do in real time.
So there's this whole genre of think pieces that say down with small talk, let's have more meaningful conversations, deep conversations. And it strikes me that this paper gives us at least some reason to push back against that, maybe to suggest that small talk has its virtues, at least when we're not engaging with those that we're already close friends with. What do you make of that?
Yeah, I mean, I used to be one of those people. I had like what I call my Holden Caulfield phase as a teenager. I struggled a lot to even understand like the content of social rules. And when I figured out what the content was, I was enraged by them because it seemed to demand so much phoniness. And I just kept thinking, why is everyone so phony? Why are they superficial? I just want to have conversations where I pour my heart out to other people and they pour their heart out to me and we make real progress on what it means to be a human. Then I read a whole bunch of Goffman and I realized the reason we can't do that is, or we just can't go around doing this with each other, is because we're vulnerable to each other. In order to feel comfortable sharing information with each other, there has to be a certain level of trust and also a certain level of openness and willingness to have an intimate relationship. And it's very important that we each are able to control who we have that kind of intimacy with. And part of the function of small talk is to build up the trust, to create conditions that will generate the kind of trust and credibility and shared feeling of safety that enables the deeper conversations that I was really craving as a young person.
So then how do you think about the case of friends? Because it does seem like once you're a close friend with somebody, you shouldn't be constantly calibrating poise against mentalism. Part of what it is to enter, you might think part of what's constitutive about being a friend to one another, is that it becomes appropriate for you to ask certain questions that would be inappropriate if you weren't their friend or you weren't their intimate partner. Do you think of it that we somehow waved our claim by becoming a friend with people, or how do you think about it?
Yeah, I don't know. That's a really great question. Whatever the right answer is, it has to be able to capture the fact that in any relationship, there's always a delicate drawing of boundaries around certain kinds of information. There's a kind of understanding that certain places might be very touchy, or we haven't gone there yet. It's not just in, you know, sometimes when moral philosophers write about intimacy, they think there's just kind of like a scale and you're on the, it's like security clearance. And you currently have security clearance level one, and you want to work up to security level clearance level 10. And when you get to that level, you get a right to more and more of my information. But it doesn't quite work like that. So I have friends who, you know, I might be perfectly willing to talk about politics and religion with, but I wouldn't want to talk about, oh gosh, I don't know, relationships with parents because it's just, it happens to be too sensitive. Or I'm willing to trash talk with them about all sorts of things going on in our professional lives. And I'm willing to talk to them about my romantic life. But I really, I know that if we talk about religion together, that is absolutely going to destroy the friendship. And so we just both kind of skirt around the topic. And I don't think those relationships are any less intimate. I don't think those relationships are any less valuable because we've like curtained off some kinds of information. I think like part of the beauty of what intimacy is, is that we can achieve it under many different kinds of conditions.
I'm a bit worried about your story about the relationship between small talk and intimacy. So I guess maybe it's a British thing, we sometimes stall at the small talk, right? And it's very hard to get away from small talk. And so maybe you might present a sort of more general worry about small talk and the kind of picture that you're pushing. So I think there's something oddly, and I do realize it's a bit weird because I'm saying this to an American, but something oddly British about the kind of privacy you have in mind here. You're saying, you know, don't bring up the hard stuff, like don't check on your colleague's health, don't check on whether kid's well-being is being served. You know, if the parents are out in public, don't say anything if they're doing it wrong. Don't ever try and get beneath the surface of someone else's performance and check that they're really okay. Unless you know them, unless you're friends, in which case maybe you can do that sometimes. And so I started to worry that maybe this British custom isn't a very good way of going about things, right? Might them help with something kind of alienating and isolating if we don't ask the bad questions. And about if we start increasing our poise so that we never give anything away, so we're kind of perpetually stuck as strangers. Because you could imagine a version of your cancer case, right, where someone's really ill and they just don't know how to say it to their close colleague. And they kind of want them to ask, but they don't want to volunteer the information out of nowhere. I think sometimes we are in that kind of situation. I certainly know friends of mine who have gone through infertility treatment. I think some of them have reported this is how they feel in the workplace. They try to give clues, but they don't want to come out and say it. But they do want to be asked. Sure, not all of them, but to some extent, people worry about that line between us, what you never ask.
Yeah, I think this is a really prescient question and it's something that I think about a lot. I mean, when I wrote this paper, I was in part thinking about my own frustrations with what I sometimes call to myself the American cult of authenticity, where everyone is constantly railing against politeness practices. Partially on political grounds, we would just be more liberated human beings if we didn't have them. And we all have to just get more comfortable asking and answering things honestly. And this is part of the project of become a flourishing person is to become completely willing to just tolerate any sorts of questions and be willing to say, no, I don't want to answer that. But I mean, your question is bringing out the problems with another extreme way of implementing all of this, which is what if we're all too reticent? And I think you're right that part of what it is to be a tactful person is not just to know what not to ask, but to know when it would actually be a gift to another person to ask them. In part because she might think that you don't want to receive that information because you don't want to become intimate with her, you don't want to be burdened by it. So you're being generous to her, not just to help her overcome a psychological block, but to signal to her, yes, I do want to be burdened by your suffering or by whatever is going on with you. And so how to square this with privacy rights, I think is a really deep question. I mean, Goffman thinks the way we handle this, or the way a tactful person should handle this, there's a kind of dance that's similar to the dance of flirting. One person gives a little information, one person prizes a little bit, and then the other person gives a little more information. And we kind of do this dance under the surface till we work up to the point where I'm sure that when I ask you, do you have cancer, you are not just willing to give me that information truthfully, but you are, as it were, waiting for me to be the one to break that official boundary. But if we don't do all that dancing, all that footwork underneath the surface first to check that I am, in fact, in a case where you would welcome that question, and you know that I know that I'm in this case, and so you know that I'm doing it as an act of generosity, then something has gone wrong.
So this is like a very subtle way of waving privacy rights. You and I engage in this dance until we're all clear that implicitly, although not explicitly, I'm saying, do ask me that.
Yes. And the reason it has to be done in such an incremental subtle way over some kind of like temporally extended period is precisely because probing to see if someone wants to wave that right is itself an act that can gain information.
I mean, one takeaway I have from this conversation is that the morality of privacy is way more expansive and nuanced than what a justified law of privacy would be. The justified law would track only a very small or at least some subset of the actual morality of privacy. Is that right?
Yeah. That's the way I'm thinking about it, yes. So there's one question about the legal right to privacy. And then there's the question of the moral practice of respecting each other's privacy. It doesn't just involve things that the law has no business regulating, but it's just vastly more intricate and expansive than what the law is concerned with.
One last substantive question from me. So all of the cases we've looked at so far seem to be about informational inquiries. And that seems to make sense given that you're concerned with a particular view of privacy as informational self-control. But it did occur to me that you could have bad questions that weren't informational inquiries understood as an effort to find out some fact about a person's life. So requests, invitations, saying, hey, can I come over tonight and see your new baby? Or do you want to go on a date with me tomorrow night? Depending on the facts of the case, these might be questions that induce loud silences too. And so I'm wondering, do you think those implicate privacy or do they implicate other interests? How do you think about those other cases?
So I think they do implicate privacy. I screened them off in this paper for a very boring reason, which is that when we start to think about requests and assertions and offers, I have to think about not just your interests in me not asking that question, but the interests I have in being in a position to ask you that question, or especially with assertions, being in a position to make a kind of assertion. But yeah, I mean, I think the account generalizes. So one of the reasons it can be really troubling to ask someone in a work context, do you want to go on a date with me without first doing all that interactional footwork is because the person might not want to reveal to you that she doesn't want to go on a date with you, right? If you never ask your coworker, you can flatter yourself with, if only she weren't my coworker and I could ask her on a date, maybe she would. But this is one of the ways we keep a peace in workplaces or in families or in small friend groups. We don't learn everything about each other and then we can flatter ourselves by telling each other stories about, oh, what that other person must really be like. And so this is, even if you know that the other person knows you won't retaliate if she says no, still it might be the case that you shouldn't ask because then you are definitely going to acquire the information that she doesn't want to date you.
One last substantive question from me, I think. So many of your examples, for understandable reasons, are of questions that most of us would never think to ask, at least not without your careful interaction or footwear. But as I read your paper, I became increasingly worried that lots of the questions that look a bit like small talk questions have an ability to become inadvertently extremely prying questions. So even how are you doing? If that person is in a really bad situation, that could go really badly. How's your partner and they've just cheated on you or been arrested, or it can force these revelations or loud silences or lies that you don't intend to be interacting. And so one thing you might just say is, hey, but you couldn't have known, so you're not really morally liable for it. I do wonder if that's a little too quick, because when we ask these questions, we are prying. It's kind of expectable that occasionally when we ask these questions, it's going to be the wrong question. So should we take those out?
No, no, I think it's exactly what you said, which is we should expect to be asked those questions. And so most of us who are in a position to cultivate ourselves this way, should cultivate ourselves into the kind of person who can give like a routine answer. They can give like the sort of... In the box. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Paint by numbers, maximally uninformative response. Oh, I'm doing fine. Oh, my partner as well. Oh, yes, I'm liking my new job. And yeah, if you're going through a really difficult situation, you might have to remind yourself, okay, if I get asked this, I'll just be like, oh yeah, it's nice. I mean, for understandable reasons, you might not be able to pull it off in the moment. But I think there's a kind of expectation that at any, you know, there are going to be various points in all of our lives where the truthful answer to this question might be distressing. And so we learn these like very uninformative scripted responses and the other person should know, okay, this is a scripted response. There's a chance she either she doesn't have anything interesting to say or she's not trying to not tell me anything.
Don't ask a follow-up is basically.
Yeah, if they're just like, oh, it's fine. You should ask them what TV shows they're watching or something.
Well, that's a very good segue to our ending. Before we let you go, we just want to ask one final, hopefully not a bad question.
Yeah, I hope so too.
We just want to ask you if you have any recommendations for our audience of anything that's brought you joy in your life lately. It could be a TV show you've watched recently, a particular dish you ate, a city you visited, something that made you happy recently.
Oh, gosh. Okay, so I'm not like an anime watcher, but I've recently watched the anime Death Note on Netflix. And one of the reasons it was awesome was the scenario the writers constructed became like an example of almost a pure information game in game theoretic terms. So the scenario is very silly, but it became philosophically fascinating. The protagonist who's also evil, so he's also the antagonist, receives a notebook where if he writes down anyone's name, that person dies. So it's a murder mystery, but you can't do any forensics because it's a magical murder weapon. This protagonist is a show-off, so he's taunting the detective looking for him by giving him information that can only be conveyed by who he kills. And the detective ends up suspecting that this guy is the murderer, becomes his friend. He can't arrest him because there is no murder weapon. He has no forensic evidence. So they interact with each other as fake friends for many, many episodes, but it's a complete information game where they kind of know and know that the other one knows that he is the murderer.
Very good. What's the name of it again?
It's called Death Note.
Death Note on Netflix. Very good. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Sam.
Yeah, thank you so much for having me. This was awesome.
Thank you so much.
All right, that was great.
It was fantastic. We're going to link to the paper in the show notes for anyone who wants to read on.
Absolutely. And please subscribe and rate us wherever you get your podcasts. Bye, Emily.
Bye, Jeff.
You've been listening to Philosophically Speaking, a production of the Digital Speech Lab at University College London. Our senior producer was George McDonough, studio recording by Matt Alcott, Teresa Baker, Ash Johnson, and Patrick Robinson. Music by the philosopher, Adam Ettenson. Your hosts were Emily McTernan and me, Jeff Howard. See you next time.